Inspiration

"Among the outdated and valuable expressions that metaphysics used, in its time, to build subtle bridges between heaven and earth, there is one that still comes to the aid of some contemporaries---and not only artist and their imitators---when faced with the problem of finding a respectable name for the source of their ideas and inventions: inspiration. Even if the word seems antiquated, and sooner earns its users a smile than recognition, it has not entirely lost its symbolic radiance. It is still vaguely suitable for marking the unclearly different, heterotropic origin of those ideas and works which cannot simply be attributed to the application of rules and the technical repetition of familiar searching and finding patterns. Whoever invokes inspiration admits that creative ideas are nontrivial events who occurrence cannot be forced. Its medium is not its master, and its recipient is not its producer. Whether it is genius that whispers the idea to its executor or chance that makes the dice fall as they do, whether it is a rupture in the usual conceptual fabric that leads to the articulation of thoughts never thought before, or whether a productive error results in the new: whatever powers are considered possible transmitters of the inspired idea, the receiver always knows that in a sense, beyond their own efforts, they have housed visitors from elsewhere in their thought.... 

...Certainly the entering visitors have become anonymous today. Even if, as the joke goes, one is often surprised to which people the ideas choose to occur: no one who is familiar with the process need doubt their sudden arrival. Where they appear, one acknowledges their presence without any closer concern for their provenance. Whatever enters the imagination is not supposed to come from anywhere except somewhere over there, from without, from and open field that is not necessarily a yonder realm."

In other words, the people receiving the inspired ideas have changed to whom they give or don't even care to give the credit. Some people think this is because we humans have grown more wise, and have figured out the visitors truly are anonymous. Sloterdijk, himself, writes about the silliness of inspired ideas coming from "some embarrassing heavens". This is what we get for living in the age of Postmodernism.

I agree that "visitors" have become largely "anonymous today".  I also believe it is not because of anything the visitors have done. I agree that man has changed. Where I part from this amazing writer is in my mystic faith and hope that the visitors have been and will forever be the same.

...and yes, I still love this book. Can you believe how beautifully he describes inspiration and the randomness of its appearance? I love that humans don't have to believe in the same origin to appreciate and to agree that inspiration exists. Beautiful. That is LOVE. Who knows? Maybe Sloterdijk agrees with me that the world needs inspiration, even if death eventually proves it to be a silly idea.